Host Immich without installing anything
Your camera roll backed up in the background, faces and places recognised on our machines, and nothing going through Google.
Starting at €15.99/month
Introduction
Immich installed, updated and backed up by us, on a machine in France. Automatic photo backup and gallery straight from your phone, with face and place recognition. You install nothing and configure no server: the application is online a few minutes after you order, under your own name.
The plan that suits it is App Performance at €15.99/month incl. VAT — 8 GB of memory. Immich runs three things at once: a PostgreSQL database with the pgvector extension, which stores the numeric fingerprints of your images; a machine-learning service that keeps the face-clustering and description-search models in memory; and the thumbnail and web-preview factory, which calls ffmpeg for videos. The first sweep through a library of tens of thousands of photos is the hungriest moment, and those 8 GB are what it is for.
Almost everyone arrives here from Google Photos. A Google Takeout export is loaded back with immich-go, the command-line tool made for the job: it reads the JSON files Google drops beside each image and restores albums, capture dates and locations — everything a plain folder copy throws away. After that, the iOS and Android apps back up the camera roll in the background, iPhone Live Photos and Android motion photos included. Your files stay files: they sit on disk in their original format, download album by album, and RAW files from the main camera brands are read just like JPEG and HEIC.
What managed hosting changes
The camera roll, backed up in the background
The iOS and Android apps send new photos up without being asked, over Wi-Fi only if you prefer. Live Photos and motion photos arrive with their video segment, RAW files with their original data.
Faces and description search, computed here
Immich groups faces and you give them names; it also indexes what is in the picture, so "red bike in the snow" finds the shot with no tagging at all. Those models run on our processors: no image is ever sent to a third-party analysis service.
Map, memories and untouched metadata
GPS coordinates are turned into place names and plotted on a map; EXIF dates feed the timeline and the "three years ago" reminders. Nothing is rewritten inside your files.
Shared albums and partner sharing
An album is shared through a public link, with a password and an expiry date, and the recipient never has to create an account. Partner sharing between two accounts makes the other person's photos appear in your own timeline.
Why hand it over rather than install it
A family that has filled its free 15 GB
Four phones, twenty years of photos, and a quota to buy again every year. Here the plan's disk space sets the limit, and the backup restarts by itself with every new photo.
A photographer keeping the digital negatives
RAW files go up alongside the JPEGs and stay untouched: Immich shows a web preview and keeps the original, the one you will reopen in Lightroom or darktable.
Grandparents who will not open an account
The christening album goes out as a public link, password-protected, expiring after a month. They click, they look, they download: there is nothing to install on their side.
Two phones, one timeline
Each person keeps their own account and their own backup, and partner sharing brings the other's photos into the same chronology. Both camera rolls end up in one place without anyone sending files around.
A club archiving its events
One album per event, photos dropped in by several volunteers, and a search that finds the 2023 poster without anyone having filed a thing.
Hosted in France
A family photo library is faces, children and addresses. Yours stays in our own infrastructure in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, which we operate ourselves, and face recognition happens on that same machine.
Frequently asked questions
Request a Google Takeout export, then load it back with immich-go. The tool reads the JSON files Google drops beside each image and restores albums, capture dates and locations — details a drag-and-drop of folders loses for good. On a library of several hundred gigabytes, expect a few hours for the import and a few more for face indexing.
JPEG, the HEIC and HEIF files from iPhones, PNG, WebP and GIF, RAW files from the main camera brands (CR2 and CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, ORF, DNG), and MP4, MOV, MKV and AVI video. iPhone Live Photos and Android motion photos keep their video segment. An XMP sidecar next to an image is taken into account.
Immich files and finds; it does not edit. No RAW development, no layers. Face recognition runs on the processor, so the first pass over a large library takes a while — after that, each new photo is handled in seconds. On iPhone, background backup depends on what iOS allows: it catches up when you open the app. And there is no desktop client that syncs both ways the way Nextcloud does.
App Performance, at €15.99/month incl. VAT. It provides 8 GB of memory where the application asks for 3 GB at minimum: the headroom serves the system, not the decor. You can change plan later without reinstalling.
Nothing on a computer. You choose the application, fill in the fields it asks for, and it goes online. On the phone you install the Immich app from the App Store or the Play Store, paste in your instance address, and the backup starts.